Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology refers to a school of psychological thought founded in the early twentieth century by the scholar Max Wertheimer. Its proponents believed that analyzing specific parts of a subject’s psychological makeup would not give an accurate assessment of the subject without taking all of the individual’s experiences and feelings into account. Until that time, the trend in psychological research was to analyze only those experiences that had an apparent connection to the issue at hand, ignoring all other thoughts and events that were not directly related to what was being examined. Gestalt psychology revolutionized psychological thinking by proving that humans make many assumptions that are not always rooted in truth and constantly make minor or major decisions based on those beliefs. Gestaltists claimed that one must take a holistic approach when studying humans because examining only parts of the whole possibly may not yield crucial information that would explain human behavior.

Background

In 1910, Max Wertheimer was traveling through Europe. He bought a stroboscope while waiting at a train station, which was a sort of forerunner to modern-day televised animated cartoons. The painted still images inside the scope would spin very fast and appear to be in motion. While peering inside the scope, Wertheimer realized that his experience of the image being in actual motion was really just an illusion. This "persistence of vision" that Wertheimer witnessed became a focal point in his movement against the current psychological trends that were based on molecularism, the breaking down of the subject matter into parts and then choosing what to examine based on its evident relevance.

The term gestalt, which is German for placed or put together, was actually coined by Wertheimer’s mentor Christian von Ehrenfels in his book On Gestalt Qualities. Von Ehrenfels attempted to analyze what melody is and how it differs from the individual notes being played. From Wertheimer’s training and his own observations, he developed his idea that there are senses that do not come from known and obvious experiences but rather from perceptions that create incognizant feelings that need more thorough scrutiny. This was in direct opposition to those psychologists who felt the need to break every experience into fragments to explain the impact of each part, ignoring the overall effect that the parts play when in conjunction with one another. In terms of music, this would be like analyzing each note of a song to determine why the listener had a pleasant sensation while listening. In reality, no one note was the causative one. All the notes played together in sequence evoked the pleasant sensation in the listener.

This may be the most famous feature of Gestalt psychology: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Another defining aspect of Gestalt psychology is the law of pragnanz, which is German and means simple, orderly or organized. Gestalt psychologists explained the law to mean that people have a tendency to see order or meaning where there really may be none. The Gestaltists used many images to demonstrate this phenomenon.

Overview

Gestalt psychology effected a great change in modern psychology and forced the psychologists to account for the Gestaltists’ discoveries that were easy to prove. Their view may have been best expressed by the French author Anaïs Nin: "We do not see the world as it is; we see it as we are." Various laws espoused by the Gestaltists are applicable many years after their discovery, and the images they used to display them are in vogue many years later and fun to try.

The law of closure means that when viewing a picture with part of it missing, an individual will say and think he or she saw it in its entirety. For example, if one were to see a line bent in the form of a triangle but missing an edge, the human mind perceives a complete triangle and connects the line. The law of similarity tells us that people tend to group like things. Additional laws known as the law of proximity, the law of symmetry, and the law of continuity demonstrate how human perception is affected by the mind and not by objective observation.

Another project of the Gestaltists was to determine what people perceive to be the ground and background of an image that can be seen either way. The famed image of a goblet framed by an image of a figure on either side, demonstrated how an image can have multiple perceptions with either the figures or the goblet as the ground or the background. The Gestaltists encouraged creative thinking to solve problems because they realized that the experience needed to find a solution may not be in the realm of the conventional and might be accessed only through unconventional means. On the other hand, one’s memories might be inaccurate and possibly altered while trying to make sense out of experiences. The Gestaltists theorized that just as when viewing an image, one modifies it to create sense of it, so too when examining one’s life occurrences, one will modify them so that they should not be bereft of meaning. This was called "logical positivism" even if it was not always purely logical and could be an illusion.

Gestalt psychology was touted as freeing the field of psychology from being an unfeeling mechanical science that ignored the sensory and emotional side of humans. It was psychology’s response to scientists’ affinity to break the natural elements down to their smallest particle, and by doing so, to understand the physical world better. But man is not a machine nor a rock or tree. To see hands, legs, feet, and face, but not the human they belong to, cannot be considered a complete view. Likewise, knowing one’s history and experiences without knowing how that person perceived them cannot be considered an accurate portrayal of that person in totality. The experiences that make up a human exceed those that are bound by objective reality. Gestalt psychology has taught that one’s decisions and choices are made through assumptions and projections regardless of the objective truth.

Bibliography

Barlow, Allen R. "Gestalt Therapy and Gestalt Psychology." Gestalt Journal, vol. IV, no. 2, 1981, n. pg.

"Gestalt psychology". Encyclopedia Britannica, 25 Oct. 2024, www.britannica.com/science/Gestalt-psychology. Accessed 13 November 2024.

Palmer, Kendra A. "Gestalt Therapy in Psychological Practice." Inquiries Journal, vol. 3, no. 11, 2011, pp. 1/1.

Wagemans, Johan, et al. “A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception: I. Perceptual Grouping and Figure-Ground Organization.” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 138, no. 6, 2012, pp. 1172–217, doi:10.1037/a0029333. Accessed 13 Nov. 2024.